


it's not the waking it's the rising

by darlingofdots



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Bedsharing, Camilla POV, Gen, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Dreams, apologies this is very sad, gratuitous use of commas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:14:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26620486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: Camilla is five and she has decided that she is going to be a cavalier.
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 11
Kudos: 62





	it's not the waking it's the rising

Camilla is five and she has decided that she is going to be a cavalier. Her father is slightly disappointed but indulgent, if only because signing her up for the aptitude tests means they don’t have to worry about her getting into trouble in the stacks for a few hours each day. They are slightly less disappointed when she careens through the tests like a nuclear missile; she will continue training, it is decided, as long as she doesn’t neglect her regular education. At this age, prospective Sixth House cavaliers are trained only insofar as they receive more comprehensive instruction in etiquette and basic physical education, but one of the Masters catches Camilla practising cartwheels in the corridors and that, apparently, was bad. Her punishment consists of writing an annotated summary of the code of conduct in her awkward block letters, which is an exceedingly dull way to spend an afternoon when you could be doing cartwheels instead. She sits at one of the big tables in the children’s study hall to do it, far away from the other kids who are all older than her and already debating like the grownups. Just as she gets to the bit of the rules she is supposed to pay special attention to (Section 9 Paragraph 6 Subsection Gamma: No running, loitering, or _fooling around interrupting the peace and quiet of the Library, Camilla Hect, that includes gymnastics_ ), a boy sits down opposite her. More accurately, a collection of sticks shaped like a boy folds itself onto the bench on the other side of the table — the newcomer already wears the grey robes of an advanced pupil, which at five Camilla would consider a sign of great wisdom if he didn’t have the build and pallor of a necromancer, who Camilla thinks are a bit silly. He doesn’t say anything, though, just watches her painstakingly scratch out another three subsections onto her notepad.

It’s only when she pauses to flip to a new page that he reaches out an enormously stick-like arm across the expanse of table between them, his thick eyeglasses slipping down his very thin nose. ‘Palamedes Sextus,’ he says, introducing himself with all the gravity of a grownup, and patiently waits while she stares at him from underneath her mop of dark hair. He has a very serious face and smudges of ink on his fingertips and the most extraordinary eyes Camilla has ever seen.

‘Camilla Hect,’ she says finally, shaking his hand, trying to sound a bit like him. She thinks she’s seen him around; he’s one of her many second cousins who is not a slight disappointment to the family.

‘I know,’ he says, and adds: ‘You’re going to be a cavalier.’

Camilla nods. ‘I know.’ And she does know, although nobody else has agreed with her yet, because apparently there’s rules and she’s done well enough in her regular classes and she thinks her father is still hoping that she’ll be a librarian like them. But Camilla has thought about that, and she thinks it’s excruciatingly dull, and there’s _loads_ of librarians on the Sixth already, so they don’t really need another one.

Palamedes Sextus says: ‘If you want to break rules you need to know what the rules are so you don’t get in trouble,’ and from that moment on she would follow him to the end of the universe.

##

Camilla is seven and the youngest person ever admitted to Swordsman’s Spire, and in her opinion the only person currently in the programme worth the steel of her rapier. It all feels very silly, the lessons in the history of the Empire and theology and protocol (maybe because she doesn’t pay a lot of attention), but every day after she endures what feels like the endless droning of the tutors they put a sword in her hand, and that’s why it’s all worth it. They tried to make her use dull, rubber-tipped practice swords for a bit, but she put a stop to that quickly. She carries her sword more easily than she ever carried a book, and if she could, she would never go anywhere without it.

But then she fails one of her history exams because she practised drills instead of studying and her teacher is disappointed and her father is too, and she ends up in the study hall again with the big textbook out in front of her and she is _not_ crying, but she hates this and she’s angry and terrified that they’ll kick her out of the programme for being too stupid.

‘You’re not stupid,’ Palamedes says when she tells him, and she believes him because when he isn’t telling the truth the muscles in his right eyebrow twitch. ‘Here, I got a commendation on my last test, I bet I can teach you.’

Palamedes is also seven and it should have been bragging but he really does teach her, because he makes all the marriage contracts and treaties and land disputes sound _interesting._ There aren’t any interesting battles in this section of the curriculum, and Camilla has already memorised all the dates but she failed her exam because she couldn’t remember any of the _why_. Palamedes isn’t great at the dates. They get shooed out of the study hall around dinner time, so they go and wolf down their portions and carry the notes they’ve been scribbling up to Palamedes’ shuck in the dormitory. Palamedes alternates between quizzing her and writing study guides for her to learn in his scratchy, spidery handwriting that Camilla can probably read better than any of his tutors. She falls asleep to the sound of his pen on flimsy, curled up on his pillow because even at seven his limbs take up almost half the narrow bed. He probably wouldn’t notice the entire library crashing down around him once he’s got his teeth into a task, and he doesn’t notice her drifting off.

Camilla doesn’t remember the dream, only the waking, feeling like she’s falling from a great height: hands on her shoulders — a body close to hers — a voice in her ear — She sits up so fast she gets a bit dizzy. Her breath is coming in gasps and her heart is racing.

‘You’re okay,’ Palamedes says. His glasses have slipped halfway down his nose. He repeats: ‘You’re okay.’

‘Sorry,’ she mumbles, pushing her hair out of her face and picking out her notes from the ocean of flimsy on the bed. ‘Thanks for helping me.’

One long finger taps the chrono display set into the headboard. ‘If they catch you in the hallway now you’ll get in trouble.’ With a rustling that suddenly seems to echo in the near silence of the dormitory, he piles his notes into a messy stack and shoves them under the mattress pad. ‘You can sneak back in the morning.’

They arrange themselves lying on their sides because they won’t fit otherwise, facing the shuck muffling. After ten minutes, Camilla hears him shift behind her, a long and ungainly process even at seven. ‘Cam,’ he whispers.

She twists around onto her other side. Now that they’ve turned off the reading light, it’s too gloomy in here to really make out his face but she thinks she can see those pale eyes of his shining. ‘Yes?’

He fumbles in the dark for her hand and squeezes it. ‘You’re going to ace that exam.’

Camilla believes him.

##

Camilla is thirteen, and she’s a cavalier. Well, she’s _applied_ to be cavalier primary, but there’s no chance she’ll be rejected. Palamedes has made it very clear that he’ll not take anybody else as his cavalier primary, and he knows and she knows that none of the other candidates vying for Master Warden pose any competition. They’ve crunched the numbers (well, Camilla crunched the numbers). He’s going to wipe the floor with his competitors and Camilla understands with the deep, steady smugness of a cat that she is one of the best cavaliers her house has produced in generations. A few of the Masters have started to ruminate on having her sent out on Cohort deployment, but Camilla’s not worried.

Returning from a frankly gruelling series of practice duels, she finds Palamedes holed up in one of the private reading cubbies in the anatomy library and flops down to lie on the bench with her head in his lap, feet planted, knees bent. The entire table is covered in his familiar war zone of books and notes and stray pens.

‘Can you check these for me?’ Palamedes asks by way of hello, passing her a stack of flimsy. For all his brilliance, he’s too caught up in his head to fill out the forms correctly, and since it almost cost him two points last cycle Camilla has been making sure he doesn’t send his Pulmonology III diagrams to the Head of Thanergetic Geometrics. She gropes blindly for a pen on the table, fixes the directory codes and passes him a clean handkerchief with her other hand. He blinks at it, slips his glasses off his nose, sighs, and breathes on the lenses to polish them.

‘I’m going to suggest using Nagata’s theorem to clear the pleural cavity again, it didn’t work last time but I think if you adjust the sequence of conversion, it should improve function by a good fifteen percent.’

Camilla says nothing. This is the part she can’t help him with; she can memorise the charts, catalogue the letters by three different systems so they can find what they need immediately, and send her love at the bottom of each letter he sends, but this mission Palamedes has set himself to save the Duchess of Rhodes has long since passed into realms of necromantic application that she couldn’t grasp even if she tried. But she listens to him theorise out loud and says ‘we tried that already’ and ‘hmm’ until she decides it’s time for dinner, because he won’t remember that he has to eat unless she reminds him. She has to practically haul him out of the cubby by the scruff of his robe and even then he has that faraway look in his eyes over forkfuls of potato, so she pinches his bony thigh under the table. He yelps.

‘It doesn’t count unless you actually swallow,’ she says.

He inhales half his plate apparently without breathing, then picks at the leftovers until she gives up and they head vaguely towards bed, arguing over the outline for the essay they’re trying to write. There’s always some degree of logistics involved in sleep; Camilla has gotten pretty used to the ink stains and the notes tacked up on the walls of Palamedes’ shuck that crinkle in the breeze of their combined breath, but he flatly refuses to sleep in hers until she’s cleared away everything with an edge. Camilla thinks he’s a bit of a wimp. Affectionately. They push at each other for a bit to get to a position of relative comfort and end up with Camilla half-draped across across his torso (only six more months to his examination, she has had actual dreams about the wild and luxurious surface area of the fancy bed in the official Master Warden’s rooms).

She’s already mostly asleep when his right hand, never actually still, passes over her upper arm where the tendon of her triceps attaches to her elbow and air hisses through her teeth. It’s just a bruise, which is what she tells him, but he turns on the anaemic reading light and makes her roll up the sleeve of her shirt so he can look at it. It’s a magnificent splotch of red already turning purple, as wide as two of her fingers and twice as long. It hurts when he pokes it.

‘It’s just a bruise,’ he concludes, rolling her sleeve back down.

‘Is it, now.’

‘You know I want to hear about it when you get hurt.’

Camilla shrugs. ‘I had to open up my side to get inside Tilly’s reach.’

Palamedes huffs. This isn’t a big deal, they both know that. Just a training scrape. Camilla also knows that he’s not really worried about bumps and bruises. She taps a quick rhythm on his knee — six short, six long — and settles back into her lumpy pillow. He follows her down, rearranging them both so her arm won’t get jostled. They drift off to sleep like that, tangled up in each other in a warm, familiar mirror image of the whole of their lives. Camilla rouses him gently when his heart suddenly drums out a frantic tattoo under her hand, and turns on the light, and presses his hand to her own heart so he knows she’s still alive and _right here_ , where she’s always been. This happens, sometimes; he doesn’t notice it much during the day, when there’s classes and research and articles to write and exams to study for, but he lugs so much worry around with him that it sometimes takes over his dreams. It’s worse when she gets hurt, or when a letter from Dulcinea arrives later than it should. Camilla knows this. She digs out the hardboiled sweets from her secret stash, a rare indulgence saved up for nights like this. When he finally falls asleep again, she’s still sitting up in the dim light, watching over him.

##

Camilla is thirteen and waiting in the hallway for Palamedes to finish his last examination. She’s been here for hours, alternating pacing with handstands against the wall until the rush of blood to her head makes her dizzy. It’s not that she’s _nervous_ , because they did the math and there’s no way he won’t pass, but, well…

‘Cam!’

She kicks her feet away from the wall and the world turns right-side-up again. Before she has time to ask, Palamedes is hugging her so tight she thinks she can feel her ribs creaking. He lifts her off the floor easily and spins them in a single, exuberant circle before putting her down. He’s breathing hard, and his eyes illuminate his entire face. He’s grinning. He’s dreamed of this for six years.

Camilla allows herself a grin in return and gently cuffs him in his skinny bicep. ‘Congratulations, Master Warden.’

##

Camilla is nineteen and standing by the Master Warden’s shoulder, a letter in her hand. She already knows what it says; she’s fairly sure that he does, too. He asks, ‘is that the post?’

‘Yes, Warden.’

He sighs and his entire body seems to deflate. ‘Alright, let’s get it over with.’ He tears the seafoam-coloured seal from the folded-up sheet of flimsy, which exudes a faint smell of roses despite its contents. It contains only a few lines, in Lady Septimus’ feathery hand. ‘Well,’ the Warden says, ‘I suppose that’s that.’

Camilla rests one hand on his arm, briefly, as he dives straight back into the minutes of his next meeting. That night she curls herself around him with his back to her front, holds him tight through the sobs he tries to stifle by crushing his face into the pillows.

##

Camilla is twenty and has just carried the lifeless, mangled body of Isaac Tettares up the facility ladder. She knows that she needs to sleep; she absolutely must not sleep. In the other room, the Warden is arguing with the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House, whose cavalier is, presumably, asleep. Camilla knows that it’s not Gideon’s fault, and that the Ninth had been in a horrible state the last time Camilla saw her, and that rest is the most important part of recovery. But even as she sits on the floor by the cavalier’s cot at the foot of the canopied bed, she has angled herself so she can see her necromancer at all times, unwilling and unable to take her eyes off him for the length of time it takes to go through her inventory of assorted weaponry.

At last, the bone adept of the Ninth leaves, and the Warden folds himself onto the floor beside Camilla with his pointy knees tucked under his chin. He watches her polish a dagger and test the edge on the pad of her thumb. ‘Come to bed,’ he says and she follows him up because that’s what she’s always done. He pulls her in close, arms around her waist, and she’s grateful for that. She can feel his heartbeat reverberating in her torso. For once, he does not enforce his policy of _no sharp edges in the bed_ and does not comment on the fact that her rapier — her stupid, ineffective rapier — lies within arm’s reach on the sheets in its shabby scabbard, between her and the door.

##

Camilla is twenty and staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. If she moves in close enough so all she can see are the eyes, and concentrates with every fibre of her being, she can almost pretend.

**Author's Note:**

> hit me up on tumblr @scesisonomaton


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